For the uninitiated, the title is a reference to an Irish song called "Whiskey in the Jar"...
Today Art and I attended a glorious afternoon / evening of concerts at the Tivoli gardens as part of the Symposium. As we had a half day today, we decided to head off into Malmö, Sweden (as Art wanted to tick another country off his list) for lunch. In the afternoon we went to several concerts in the Tivoli gardens including a nice little group from Cuba and a wonderful group from Indonesia (but more on those later). It was a lovely atmosphere, the Tivoli gardens is kind of like an upmarket theme park (dubbed as an 'amusement park and pleasure gardens' by the Danes), with lovely fountains, scary rides, ice cream parlours, people selling 'cheap' tat (but its really expensive), restaurants, a concert hall, rotunda and outdoor performance spaces. We had a lovely afternoon. The evening concluded with 2 concerts in the Tivoli Concert Hall, the Danish Radio National Girls Choir and the Danish Radio Vocal Ensemble, which were both pretty good, and then the fabulous jazz and modern music acapella groups, Touche, VoxNorth and Vocal Line. Personally of all these Touche were my favourite.
Anyway, you get the picture. We'd had a lovely time attending all these concerts, our ears were full of beautiful music, and so we got on the bus back to the hostel in pretty good spirits.
Unfortunately on the bus was an extremely drunk man with an unopened bottle of lager. He heard us talking in English and then started to sing some English songs, before staggering up off his seat as if to get off the bus, which was pulling into a stop. Unfortunately his balance was not all that, and he leeringly wandered over to the door which was right next to where Art and I were sitting, Art being sat closest to the door. The man reached up over Art's head to steady himself on the rail, and as he did so, lurched into it and smashed his unopened bottle of lager against the rail above Art's head!
Poor Art sat there, drenched in beer, covered in glass, and unable to open his eyes for fear of glass going in them and also because they were full of alcohol. He was completely saturated! He had glass all over his hair (lucky for him its short and you could easily pull it out), all over his face and arms, and the beer had soaked into his shirt, name badge and the book he was carrying. It was awful! I copped a little bit too, but no where near as much as Art - except for one unfortunate thing. You see, I was wearing a top with a low neckline - and I could feel straightaway lager and glass going down into my bra! But as if you can fish around in there on a public bus to get it out!
The driver was extremely helpful, wouldn't move the bus on til he could see Art was ok, and then gave him an incident report slip so he could register it in case CCTV on the bus enabled a clear picture of the drunk (as if!). The other passengers were most helpful too, and extremely concerned - but I do think that part of it was that they didn't want us to go away with a poor impression of Danes, as one bloke kept pointing out "It was just an accident. He didn't mean to smash the bottle, he wanted to drink it later..."
But we were very lucky not to have been injured...
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